


The Ice Inside Your Soul

by Azar



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Ficlet, M/M, Multi, Other, Psychic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 05:54:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19167151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azar/pseuds/Azar
Summary: It’s been four months, eleven days, and ten hours since Peggy last felt warm.





	The Ice Inside Your Soul

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken--completely out of/ignoring context--from 'Jar of Hearts' by Christina Perri. 
> 
> This is a fragment of a larger work that I do hope to finish someday, but which I think can stand on its own. I will post the rest as a sequel if or when I do finish it, I promise!
> 
> I actually have a love/hate relationship with the soulmates trope. I don't believe in soulmates, but I can't seem to stop reading it. So, when someone requested it for a fic exchange I participated in, I couldn't resist the temptation to both come up with my own version of a soulmate identifier and also leave some ambiguity in it so that what MIGHT be indicative of soulmates might also mean something completely different. Hence, the touch-bond. If anyone is interested, the story where I introduced the concept (or at least my version of it, I don't know if there are others) is the Due South fic 'Tell Me About This Lightning' here:
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/4581720

It’s been four months, eleven days, and ten hours since Peggy last felt warm. Japan surrendered thirteen days ago, nearly fourteen, and as soon as the announcement reached them, Howard began making plans for an expedition into the waters off Greenland where the Valkyrie went down. Bless him: Howard has his faults, but he believed her the moment she said Steve wasn’t dead. Most of Steve’s superiors tried to argue that even if he weren't dead, he was surely unconscious, and she oughtn’t to be sensing anything either way. The implication being, of course, that it was all in her head. They came round eventually, but not until Sergeant Barnes awoke and corroborated her story. (Bucky didn’t have to believe her. He can feel it too. Yes, Captain America has two soulmates. The Army brass aren’t at all happy about that, but they’ve made do because it quickly became apparent that Steve wasn’t about to do _anything_ the normal way.)

Still, it galls her that they needed corroboration at all. Peggy knows the difference between grief and a living, pulsing touch-bond. She resents the implication that any woman wouldn’t. Unconscious or no, somehow the awareness of the ice has penetrated Steve’s body, his mind. He’s alive. And he’s so, so cold.

Peggy doesn’t know _how_ he’s still alive; she only knows he is. Howard hypothesized that it must be some effect of the serum, sustaining him in conditions that would kill a normal man. If not drowning or the cold, then starvation. Thirst. So many ways to die, and Steve’s somehow managed to elude them all. In spite of herself, Peggy can understand in some small way how that might be hard to believe. God knows if she didn’t feel what she feels—if she didn’t have Bucky to hold her at night, both of them trembling with a chill far deeper than a New York winter and yet praying for it not to end—she might have long given up hope herself.

She hates that they had to put the search on hold to finish the war. God knows Bucky does too, and fought it perhaps even harder than she did. But Steve would understand. No, Steve would have wanted it this way, Peggy knows that too. But she still hates leaving him behind. She hates the lingering fear that every day they wait might bring him one day closer to death. In that regard, the cold is comforting. So long as she awakes each day shivering, Steve is still out there, waiting for them to find him.

They’re not waiting anymore. Steve owes her a dance, and besides, Peggy’s bloody tired of freezing all the time.

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes about how the touch bond works in my head, in case anyone's curious about it:  
> \- The connection is formed the first time soulmates touch each other, and they feel everything the other feels from that point on.  
> \- It is extremely rare to have more than one soulmate. It is also possible to have no soulmate; this is most common with people who are aromantic asexual, but it does happen in other circumstances as well.  
> \- The shared sensation lasts just as long for both the person physically experiencing it and the person(s) psychically experiencing it.  
> \- One soulmate dying does not kill the other(s), but if the death was violent, the pain can put the other(s) in a coma for a while.  
> \- Because of the existence of soulmates (or rather, of people interpreting the touch bond as proof of soulmates), taboos against same-sex and poly relationships do not exist as such. There are, however, taboos against getting involved with someone who is not your soulmate once the touch bond has been formed. Before the bond is formed, it's treated as a necessary evil.  
> \- Soulmate/touch-bond relationships are not guaranteed to be healthy. In fact, the belief in soulmates has contributed to people staying in unhealthy relationships when they shouldn't.  
> \- As a result of the previous two factors, there are movements to legitimize post-soulmate non-soulmate relationships.
> 
> Oh, and I don't know if anyone would WANT to play in this universe, but you're welcome to. Just one condition: send me the link and/or please link one or both of my stories as a related work! ;-)


End file.
